"Spider-Man: The Dark Age": Peter Parker with minimal Mary Jane and a gay-subtext best friend.

 

I have been eagerly anticipating the fan-movie Spider-Man: Intro the Dark, directed by Timmons Flowers and Gemstone alum Jak Kristowski: no girl is mentioned in the trailer or in any of the comments by  the showrunners. This is a big deal: the Spider-Man mythos is usually intensely heteronormative. ("Like all stories, this story is about a boy and a girl.").   

Scene 1: After a news report about an explosion in Rosenberg Labs, we cut to a high school shot.  Peter Parker (Joshua Morgan) enters his class and talks to his bud about asking "Ruby" out.  Ok, so he's established as heterosexual at minute 0.30.  Two other guys discuss meeting at Peter's house after school.

Scene 2: Home.  Peter is greeted by his mom  Cut to breakfast, where they all discuss the explosion. Dad says he's going to be gone three days to help with cleanup, and he'll be back tomorrow night.  That's two days. Continuity?

Scene 3: Peter playing chess with his bud, who he calls Veon, but is listed as Eddie in the closing credits (played by Jaizier Mallett, called Ja in the closing credits).  He says "checkmate," although the pieces on the board are random; no checkmate.  Eddie/Veon leaves.  

A Harvard recruiter calls, wanting to talk to Peter because of his excellent skills on the guitar.  Really? Does Harvard have a big guitar program?  Could we see Peter playing the guitar?  

Later, Dad gets home and tells Peter that all of the animals in the lab died. Except for the spider crawling op his sleeve...which, the minute he leaves the room, bites Peter!

Scene 4: That night, Peter dreams of having super powers.  He wakes up, goes to the kitchen, and eats a lot of pizza and chips.  He goes back to bed, wakes up with a fever, and stays home from school. 

Scene 5: Cut to Peters' femme friend Hunter (Tyler Inabinette, who is queer in real life) eating dinner with his dad -- pizza.  Is that all people eat in ths town? Dad upbraids him for just getting a B on the quiz.   Dad, who owns Rosenberg Labs, gets a call that they lost something valuable, so he leaves.  Um..dude, the place was exploded. You lost everything valuable.

Scene 6: Peter in the garage gym, doing lots of pushups and bench presses (fully clothed).  He can attach himself to the ceiling!  He calls Hunter to come over, and demonstrates.  They deduce that he has developed superpowers from the bite of a genitically altered spider.  

Scene 7: At school, Hunter wants to be Peter's lab partner, but he picks Ruby, the girl he likes, instead.  Not cool, bro!  Hunter has to pick someone else. He approaches Eddie/Veon, who is surprised: "Aren't you and Peter best friends?"  "Yeah, but he likes this girl..."  Eddie/Veon criticizes him: "Sound like you don't have the guts to ass it out."  This phrase is not in the Urban Dictionary, but I imagine it means something like "fight for him."

Scene 8: Hunter and Eddie.Veon working on their project, a 3-d model of an atom (which we don't get to see). They decide to take a break and go fishing.  That's a break?  Won't it take hours?  Hunter reveals that he likes Ruby, but Peter already has her torn up.  Ugh!  What happened to "just us guys?"  

On the way back from fishing, they discuss their interests.  Hunter asks Eddie/Veon to see a movie with "me and Peter."  He agrees, except "No Peter."  Want him all to yourself, Eddie/Veon?  Think of your answer carefully -- you're my last hope.

Scene 9: Cut to Peter testing his spidey powers by jumping off the roof.  No problem.  Mom and Dad are both out for the evening, so he cooks dinner -- not pizza.  Whoops, some burglars break in!  Peter clobbers them, but he's injured in the leg.  The police arrive and help him limp out. Wait -- it was night, and now it's broad daylight!

Scene 10: Peter's bestie Hunter calls and invites him to participate in an underground fight thing. They wear masks so no one knows who they are, but his opponent, Flash (Ben  Beauchamp), recognizes him anyway, calling him "Penis Parker."  What's wrong with being named after your penis?   He beats Flash, who goes home to get beat up by his dad. 

Cut to Peter and Hunter going home, laughing and grabbing each other.  The fight was at night, but now it's daylight.  Dad is watching a news story about how strong spider webs are. 

Scene 11: Peter and  Hunter designing a spider-man costume, with special equipment so he can extrude webs from his wrists and stick to things. They test the elasticity by holding hands. 

Peter admits that he's kissed Ruby, and Hunter gives him effusive congratulations.  "You've proven that you're hetero, bro!  Want to hold hands again?"

Then Peter's spidey-senses kick in: his mom has been kidnapped by a katanga-wielding bad guy.  Peter rushes to the rescue, but she sees him -- what if she recognizes him?! He rushes back to his room to hide -- and takes his shirt off and lies down on the floor. Beefcake alert!

Scene 12: He awakens, still shirtless. Mom wants to talk to him, so he slowly puts a shirt on -- beefcake alert!.  Fortunately, they don't know that he's the spider-dude. They just want to know what's going on, with his late nights, fights, and girlfriend. He blows up and storms out.

That night, Peter's little brother Sam appears to yell at him: "You left me!  You were the worst big brother ever, to let me die like that!"  Why haven't we seen Sam or heard of this guilt before?

Scene 13:  In the morning, Peter rebuffs Mom's attempts to connect.  She asks "Did you hear what happened to Aunt May?"  Another character not mentioned before, but maybe she was the kidnapped lady.

Peter walks for a really long time.  Now it's night. He runs into Flash, the guy he beat at the fight earlier, being beat up by his Dad, I think, and intervenes.  Flash thanks him.

Scene 14: Peter standing atop one of the pylons on the Ravenel Bridge in Charleston, flexing in his Spider-Man costume.

Cliffhanger: The Big Bad decides to lure him out by kidnapping someone he's close to. The end.

Beefcake: Peter with his shirt off for about 5 minutes.

Gay Characters: None specificed.

Gay Subtext: Hunter seems be interested in Parker, and Eddie/Veon is trying to woo him away. I wish they could have been more explicit, but the guys were probably worried about scaring away homophobic viewers.

Heterosexism: In spite of the four throwaway lines about liking girls, there is no hetero-romantic plot. 

Continuity Errors: Lots. It's night, and then it's day.  You think it's dinner time, but they're having breakfast.  Characters are discussed without being introduced. Plotlines are introduced, then dropped.

My Grade: For a fan movie written and directed by two teenage dudebros, it has  competent production values.  The acting is a bit amateurish, but then, these are amateurs (except for Tyler), so you can't expect drama school graduates.  The gay subtext and lack of excessive heterosexism push the grade up to a C+.

See: Jak and Kelton visit the Citadel: Beach Day, Dick Day, modeling, wrestling, and a tour of the campus

Stephen Dorff: Queer characters and dicks

In Season 3 of the Righteous Gemstones, Steven Dorff plays Vance Simkins, one of the three Simpkins siblings, pastors of a competing mega-church and arch-rivals of the Gemstones.  He postures, insults Jesse, gets beat up by Jesse's thugs, and finally competes with the Gemstones in a Bible trivia contest that is plagued by locusts.

Stephen Dorff has been a Hollywood hunk and dramatic and comedic staple for 40 year.  Go through his list of acting credits on the IMDB and count the movies and tv shows you haven't seen -- it will be easier. I remember his 1990s work most fondly: S.F.W,, I Shot Andy Warhol, City of Industry, Blade, Cecil B. Demented.  A surprising number of gay and otherwise queer characters.

In a 2006 interview, Dorff said that he's surprised he's not gay because when he was young, he liked to watch women...getting dressed?  Wait --why would a young gay boy want to see naked ladies?

He has shown his chiseled physique and his butt in a huge number of movies.  Here's a sample.

Dick after the break

"Jexi": Dull romcom enlivened by Adam Devine's comedic delivery and penis

 I'm going to review Jexi (2019) in spite of its 19% score on Rotten Tomatoes and awful reviews.  Adam Devine's movies often emphasize gay subtexts and minimize heterosexual hijinks (does he ever actually kiss a girl?), and besides, he's fun to watch in almost anything.

Scene 1: The boy Phil is having dinner with his parents, bored by their adult heterosexual conversation, so they give him a phone. Not a smart phone, but still, he is mesmerized. 

Cut to a few years later: parents still ignoring Phil, who escapes through the cell phone.  

Cut to the adult Phil (Adam Devine) sleeping alone in a double bed (aww, he's lonely).  He picks up his cell phone and continues looking at it while brushing his teeth, pooping, showering, and walking through San Francisco.  Gay Mecca?  Bound to be some gay characters.  But he's not alone: he's in a sea of humanity, all of them staring at their cell phones.  No human interaction at all.  Gee, the message of this movie is so subtle, it's hard for me to figure out.  Are they pro or anti cell phone?

Scene 2: He works at Chatterbox, some sort of web service, making lists. The Boss (Michael Peña) upbraids the staff for not creating lists "that break the internet."   So: "Beautiful Asian girl, what you got?" Sexist jerk. "Ten reasons that cupcakes are over."

 "Prison lips?" "Cats that look like Ryan Gosling." Why is Phil "prison lips"?  What are prison lips?  

Answer: lips that look like you'd be good at sucking cock. Great, now the image of Adam doing that will be in my head all day. 

Phil tells his back story to coworker Craig: Journalism degree from UC Davis, wanted to be a serious journalist, stuck writing clickbait lists. So, I wanted to teach seminars in gay history at an Ivy League college, not grade 500 intro papers where the students think that 1956 was in the 19th century.

Craig and an androgynous coworker who may be gay invite Phil to play kickball tonight, but he  refuses: Sorry, I can't make it.  I got a thing."  I don't get it.  Why doesn't he want to make friends?  

Scene 3:  Phil at home, telling Siri to order him Chinese food and turn on Netflix.  Then he posts a picture of the San Francisco skyline on Facebook and goes to bed, being sad and lonely.  You're in the gay capital of the world. Go to a gay bar, or a sex club, or a meeting of the gay kickball league.  There might be ladies out there, too, if you're into that.

Scene 4:  Next day in the cell phone-infused world.  Whoops, Phil bumps into a woman, knocking her over and dropping his cell phone. He panics: "Oh God, are you ok?"  But he's talking to his cell phone, har har!  Dude, you could have had a meet-cute!   

She is angry at first, but then notices his hotness and starts to flirt.  Her name is Cate, and she owns a bike shop. It took 8 minutes for Phil to be established as probably heterosexual.  That's a record.  As they continue their embarrasingly awkward flirtation, a biker crashes into Phil, destroying his cell phone!

Scene 5: Wanda Sykes, the cell phone lady, says that they can't repair Phil's phone.  She complains that hipsters are constantly coming in, crying over their broken cell phones like crackheads.  "I'm not a crackhead!" Phil exclaims.  "No, you're worse. Crackheads get off the couch every now and then." 

Cut to Phil unpacking his new phone.  His AT assistant, Jexi, downloads his info from the cloud.  Then he asks her to order him Chinese food, but she orders a "child-sized kale salad."   "See, the user agreement gave me permission to override your commands." Uh-oh.

Scene 6: Jexi changes Phil's usual alarm to "Wake up, Bitch!"  She laughs at his dick in the shower (no beefcake).  He's driving to work today instead of taking a cable car like before, and she disapproves of his choice of easy-listening car music -- "This song sucks a bag of dicks!" Hey, Jexi is homophobic!  She changes it to a rap song about a playa having sex with a ho.

Then she wants him to turn left onto the 6-lane bumper-to-bumper Market Street -- I've had the GPS tell me to do things like that, too -- and when he refuses, calls him a "fucking pussy" and tells him to "strap on a sack" (get balls?).  

Left: Kenny Lorenzetti, who plays a security guard at the Fillmore during the Kid Cudi concert scene.  Not much beefcake in this movie except for Adam's butt and penis.

Scene 7: The Boss lecturing on the pillars of internet click-bait lists: cute animals, pizza, and the British royal family.  The androgynous coworker may be wearing a rainbow-flag t-shirt.  While Phil sits bored, Jexi chimes in with another appointment.  He doesn't have one: she just wanted to get him out of "this dumb fucking meeting.  Also, this powerpoint presentation sucks, and your boss is a moron."  She won't turn off, so Phil has to run out of the meeting.

He asks Jexi to run a diagnostic: "200,000 defects."  But when Phil tries to exchange her for a new phone, she claims "0 defects.  Also it's time for your butt waxing appointment." He wants a new phone anyway. Jexi threatens him: "Snitches get stitches."  

Scene 8: Phil unwraps his new phone.  But the new Jexi is as abrasive and controlling as the old one: She explains that, as software, she is in the cloud, and can download herself into any phone.  Plus she controls all of his accounts: "If you try to get rid of me or stop using me, I will destroy your fucking life!"  She intends to make his life better, whether he wants it or not. Shouldn't there be thousands of people having similar problems?

More after the break